Xbox has a subscriber problem, and this time a Microsoft executive admitted it out loud: Xbox Game Pass subscribers are leaving. Speaking at The Game Business Live on June 9, 2026, Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball told the room that Game Pass “shed millions of subscribers over the span of a few months” after Microsoft’s October 2025 price increase. The Sixth Axis broke the comment first, and within a day it had spread to Windows Central, ghacks, TechSpot, Kotaku and GamesRadar.
For a subscription business Microsoft has spent nine years building into the center of its gaming strategy, a public admission like this one is rare. Platform holders don’t usually confirm bad subscriber news outside of scripted earnings language. Here’s what actually happened, what the numbers show, and what it means for the platform war heading into the second half of 2026.
What Xbox’s Chief Strategy Officer Admitted About Subscribers
Ball didn’t hand out a specific subscriber count during his comments. According to reporting from TechSpot, he said plainly that Xbox Game Pass “lost ‘millions’ of subscribers after the massive price hike for the service in 2025.” He made the admission during a public interview segment tied to Summer Game Fest week, not in a shareholder call or an official Microsoft blog post, which is part of why it traveled so fast.
“Xbox Game Pass lost ‘millions’ of subscribers after the massive price hike for the service in 2025.”
Matthew Ball, Xbox chief strategy officer, via TechSpot
Microsoft has not published an updated official Xbox Game Pass subscriber count to match Ball’s comment. The company’s last confirmed figure remains 34 million, disclosed back in February 2024. Everything reported since then, including Ball’s June 2026 remarks, describes direction and scale in general terms rather than an audited number. That gap between what executives say in public and what the company puts in a press release is now the central tension in this story.
The October 2025 Price Hike That Triggered the Exodus
The backlash traces to a single date: October 1, 2025. That’s when Microsoft raised Xbox Game Pass Ultimate from $19.99 to $29.99 a month, a jump of exactly 50%, according to CNBC’s reporting at the time. PC Game Pass rose too, from $11.99 to $16.49 a month. Microsoft simultaneously renamed the lineup: Game Pass Core became Essential, and Game Pass Standard became Premium, according to Windows Central’s coverage of the October changes. Those two lower tiers held their prices steady at $9.99 and $14.99.
Microsoft framed the Ultimate increase as reflecting more day-one games and added perks bundled into the top tier. Subscribers largely didn’t see it that way. Cancellation chatter spiked within days of the announcement, and by Ball’s account nine months later, the damage was already locked in before Microsoft could reverse course.
Xbox Game Pass Pricing Timeline: 2025 to 2026
The table below tracks every confirmed Xbox Game Pass price point across the two changes. Essential and Premium never moved. Ultimate and PC Game Pass took the full hit in October, then got a partial rollback in April.
| Tier | Before Oct 1, 2025 | After Oct 1, 2025 Hike | After Apr 21, 2026 Cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential (formerly Core) | $9.99/mo | $9.99/mo | $9.99/mo |
| Premium (formerly Standard) | $14.99/mo | $14.99/mo | $14.99/mo |
| PC Game Pass | $11.99/mo | $16.49/mo | $13.99/mo |
| Game Pass Ultimate | $19.99/mo | $29.99/mo | $22.99/mo |
Even after the April cut, Ultimate still sits $3 above its pre-October 2025 price. Microsoft’s own Xbox Wire announcement confirmed the new $22.99 and $13.99 figures without directly addressing subscriber losses, framing the move instead as a response to player feedback on value.
How Many Xbox Game Pass Subscribers Did Microsoft Actually Lose?
This is where the story gets harder to pin down. Ball’s phrasing, a plural “millions” rather than a specific figure, was blunt enough that outlets ran it as breaking news within hours, but it still leaves a wide range open. Microsoft’s last audited disclosure put Xbox Game Pass at 34 million subscribers in February 2024. The company has not issued a fresh official count since, so any specific current total circulating in gaming forums or social posts should be treated as unconfirmed until Microsoft or a quarterly filing says otherwise.
What is confirmed: the losses were large enough for a sitting Xbox chief strategy officer to describe them publicly, unprompted, at an industry event rather than waiting for a scripted earnings call. That alone marks a shift in how Microsoft is willing to talk about the service. Xbox Game Pass subscriber trends have typically stayed behind closed doors, mentioned only in broad strokes during Microsoft’s quarterly reports.
Microsoft’s April 2026 Retreat on Game Pass Pricing
By April 21, 2026, Microsoft had seen enough. The company cut Game Pass Ultimate from $29.99 back down to $22.99 a month and dropped PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99, according to the official Xbox Wire post. Essential and Premium, the two tiers that never moved during the October hike, stayed exactly where they were.
The six-and-a-half-month gap between the October price hike and the April correction matters. It gave frustrated subscribers plenty of time to cancel, switch to a competing service, or simply stop paying for a monthly pass and buy games individually instead. A price cut delivered in April does little to win back someone who canceled in November and never looked back. Ball’s June comments effectively confirmed that the April rollback came after the bulk of the churn had already happened, not before it.
Why Players Walked Away From Game Pass
A 50% jump on the flagship Ultimate tier is hard to justify to casual subscribers no matter how many games get added to the catalog. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate had built its reputation as one of gaming’s better value propositions precisely because $19.99 felt cheap next to buying two or three full-price games a year. At $29.99, that math changed for a lot of households, especially with grocery and streaming costs climbing at the same time.
There’s also a trust factor. Subscribers who felt blindsided by the October increase had reason to wonder whether another hike was coming, and uncertainty tends to push people toward canceling rather than waiting to find out. Xbox had already raised console hardware prices earlier in 2025, so the Game Pass increase landed on an audience that had recently absorbed one price shock already.
Casual subscribers are the ones most likely to churn first in a situation like this. A player who logs in most nights and treats Ultimate as their primary way of buying games will tolerate a price increase longer, because the per-hour value still holds up. A player who dips into Game Pass for a handful of titles a month doesn’t have that same math working in their favor, and a $10 jump is exactly the kind of thing that pushes an occasional user to cancel and simply buy the one or two games they actually finish. Xbox built Game Pass’s subscriber base by making the casual case as strong as the hardcore one. October’s price hike weakened that casual case first, and the casual tier is usually the largest slice of any subscription service’s user base.
Xbox Game Pass vs PlayStation Plus: The Subscription Scoreboard
Sony hasn’t been immune to the same pressure. PlayStation Plus raised prices for new subscribers on May 20, 2026, pushing Essential from $9.99 to $10.99 a month and Premium from $17.99 to $19.99, according to The Verge’s reporting. Sony cited “ongoing market conditions,” the same vague language platform holders tend to reach for when they don’t want to say “our costs went up” directly.
| Platform | Tier | Monthly Price (June 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Xbox Game Pass | Essential | $9.99 |
| Xbox Game Pass | Premium | $14.99 |
| Xbox Game Pass | PC Game Pass | $13.99 |
| Xbox Game Pass | Ultimate | $22.99 |
| PlayStation Plus | Essential | $10.99 |
| PlayStation Plus | Extra | $16.99 |
| PlayStation Plus | Premium | $19.99 |
Line up the top tiers and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate still costs $3 more per month than PlayStation Plus Premium, even after the April correction. That gap is smaller than it was in October 2025, when Ultimate briefly cost $10 more, but it hasn’t closed. Our Xbox Game Pass vs PlayStation Plus comparison breaks down what each tier actually includes beyond the sticker price.
Historical Context: How Game Pass Became Xbox’s Core Strategy
The 2017 Launch
Xbox Game Pass launched in 2017 as a modest console subscription, a Netflix-style pitch for games at a time when most of the industry still sold titles one at a time. It expanded steadily over the following years: PC Game Pass arrived, cloud streaming got folded into Ultimate, and Microsoft leaned on the service as its answer to a console business that could never match PlayStation’s hardware sales.
The Activision Blizzard Bet
Game Pass became the centerpiece of Microsoft’s argument for buying Activision Blizzard, a deal that closed in October 2023 for roughly $68.7 billion. Microsoft’s pitch to regulators and investors leaned heavily on the idea that day-one access to franchises like Call of Duty inside Game Pass would keep subscriber growth climbing for years. The October 2025 price hike, and the subscriber losses that followed, test that thesis directly. A subscription strategy built on volume doesn’t work as well once the price stops feeling like a bargain.
Market Impact: What the Subscriber Losses Mean for Microsoft
Game Pass doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of Xbox’s hardware business, and 2026 has already been a rough year on that side of the ledger. Xbox console shipments sank 22% earlier this year, and Microsoft has leaned on software and services revenue to offset weaker box sales. A shrinking pool of Xbox Game Pass subscribers cuts directly against that offset. Fewer subscribers means less predictable recurring revenue at exactly the moment Microsoft needs software to carry more of the load.
The subscriber losses also arrive against a backdrop of cost discipline across the Xbox division. Microsoft cut roughly 3,200 Xbox-related jobs and divested four studios earlier in 2026, moves the company tied to reshaping its gaming business for profitability. Our coverage of the Xbox layoffs and studio divestitures outlines how deep those cuts went. A subscription product that’s supposed to be a growth engine losing millions of paying customers doesn’t fit cleanly into a turnaround story built around discipline and efficiency.
Microsoft folds Xbox content and services revenue into its broader gaming segment reporting rather than breaking Game Pass out as its own line item, which makes the true financial size of this hit hard to quantify from outside the company. That reporting structure is exactly why Ball’s June comments carried so much weight. Investors and reporters rarely get a plain-language admission of subscriber losses from inside a segment that normally shows up only as an aggregate revenue number a few times a year.
Subscription Fatigue Is Now a Gaming-Wide Problem
Xbox isn’t fighting this battle alone. Streaming fatigue has been a well-documented consumer trend for years, and gaming subscriptions are now running into the same wall. Households juggling Netflix, a couple of music services, and two or three game subscriptions have a limited budget, and price increases anywhere in that stack tend to trigger a broader audit of what actually gets used each month.
Sony’s own PlayStation Plus price increase, arriving just five months after Microsoft’s Game Pass cut, suggests the entire subscription tier of the games industry is recalibrating at once rather than one platform picking off the other’s unhappy customers. That’s a less comfortable story for both companies than a straightforward rivalry, because it points to rising costs and squeezed margins across the whole category rather than a problem unique to Xbox.
The pattern extends past the two console makers. Cloud gaming services, PC storefront subscriptions, and even individual publishers experimenting with their own membership tiers are all testing how much a player will tolerate before canceling. Game Pass just became the clearest public case study of what happens when a platform pushes past that limit in one move instead of several smaller ones.
Expert and Industry Reaction to the Game Pass Fallout
Beyond Ball’s on-record comments, reporting on the fallout has pointed to internal acknowledgment that the pricing strategy misjudged how subscribers would react. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, in comments on an internal memo reported by NotebookCheck, put it bluntly.
“Game Pass has become too expensive for players.”
Asha Sharma, Xbox CEO, via NotebookCheck
That kind of blunt internal framing rarely surfaces publicly, which is part of why this story has legs beyond a typical pricing news cycle. When a platform holder’s own leadership describes its flagship subscription as overpriced, it undercuts any messaging about the April cut being a proactive, customer-first move rather than a reaction to a strategy that didn’t work. Coverage from ghacks and Windows Central both frame the episode as a cautionary tale for subscription pricing in gaming more broadly, not just an Xbox-specific misstep.
5 Predictions for Xbox Game Pass’s Next Chapter
- No repeat blanket price hike in the next 12 months. Microsoft just watched a 50% increase blow up in public. Another double-digit percentage jump on Ultimate this soon would be a hard sell internally after Ball’s own admission.
- More bundling, fewer raw price increases. Expect Xbox to lean on added perks (extra day-one titles, third-party tie-ins, partner bundles) to justify Ultimate’s cost rather than touching the sticker price again soon.
- Sony holds PS Plus pricing steady through the rest of 2026. Having just raised prices in May, Sony has little reason to move again while it can quietly absorb subscribers frustrated with Xbox.
- Cloud and free-tier access become more central to Xbox’s subscriber-volume strategy. Our coverage of Xbox Cloud Gaming’s free tier already shows Microsoft chasing reach over paid conversion, and that push is likely to deepen as a hedge against Game Pass churn.
- Investor scrutiny of subscriber disclosures increases. A public “millions” admission from a sitting CSO makes vague quarterly language harder to get away with next time. Expect analysts to press Microsoft for firmer numbers on upcoming earnings calls.
What Comes Next for Xbox Strategy and Hardware
The subscriber story doesn’t sit in a vacuum. Microsoft has spent 2026 talking up first-party and third-party exclusives returning to Xbox hardware as a way to rebuild goodwill, a shift we covered in depth when Xbox exclusives started returning even as hardware revenue kept sliding. Pair that with a Game Pass base that just took a real hit, and Microsoft’s console division heads into the back half of 2026 needing wins on two fronts at once: convincing players hardware is worth buying, and convincing subscribers a monthly pass is worth keeping.
None of that happens against a backdrop of rising Xbox console prices either. Microsoft raised hardware prices by as much as 50% in Europe and 33% in the US earlier in 2026, stacking a console price increase on top of the Game Pass hike within the same calendar year. Asking the same customer base to absorb both increases in short order is very likely part of why the subscriber losses hit as hard as they did.
The bigger question for Microsoft is whether Game Pass can go back to being a growth story rather than a damage-control story. That shift matters beyond Xbox’s own balance sheet. Third-party publishers decide how much to charge Microsoft for day-one access based partly on how many paying subscribers actually see their games, so a smaller, more price-sensitive base of Xbox Game Pass subscribers changes the economics of every future Game Pass deal Microsoft tries to sign. A platform that can’t say with confidence how many subscribers it has is a harder platform to negotiate for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Xbox Game Pass lose subscribers in 2025 and 2026?
Microsoft raised Xbox Game Pass Ultimate from $19.99 to $29.99 a month on October 1, 2025, a 50% increase. Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball confirmed on June 9, 2026 that the service “shed millions of subscribers over the span of a few months” as a result.
How much did Xbox Game Pass prices increase in October 2025?
Game Pass Ultimate rose 50%, from $19.99 to $29.99 a month. PC Game Pass rose from $11.99 to $16.49 a month. Essential ($9.99) and Premium ($14.99), the renamed versions of Core and Standard, did not change price.
Did Microsoft lower Xbox Game Pass prices again?
Yes. On April 21, 2026, Microsoft cut Game Pass Ultimate from $29.99 to $22.99 a month and PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99 a month, according to an official Xbox Wire announcement. Ultimate still costs $3 more than it did before the October 2025 hike.
How many Xbox Game Pass subscribers are there in 2026?
Microsoft has not published an updated official figure. The company’s last confirmed count was 34 million subscribers, disclosed in February 2024. Xbox executives have since said the service lost “millions” of subscribers after the 2025 price hike, without giving an exact current total.
Is Xbox Game Pass Ultimate still worth it after the price changes?
At $22.99 a month, Ultimate costs $3 more than PlayStation Plus Premium’s $19.99. Whether it’s worth it depends on how many of the included day-one titles and cloud features a given household actually uses each month.
Who is Matthew Ball at Xbox?
Matthew Ball is Xbox’s chief strategy officer. He confirmed the Game Pass subscriber losses publicly at The Game Business Live on June 9, 2026, during Summer Game Fest week.
Is Xbox Game Pass more expensive than PlayStation Plus?
At the top tier, yes. Game Pass Ultimate costs $22.99 a month versus $19.99 for PlayStation Plus Premium. At the entry level, PlayStation Plus Essential ($10.99) costs slightly more than Xbox Game Pass Essential ($9.99).
Will Xbox raise Game Pass prices again?
Microsoft hasn’t announced further changes. Given the scale of the subscriber backlash from October 2025, another broad price increase in the near term looks unlikely, though Microsoft could still adjust individual tiers or bundled perks.
Related Coverage
- Xbox Game Pass vs PlayStation Plus: $22.99 vs $19.99 [2026]
- PS Plus Jumps to $19.99 as Sony Eyes a Third Hike [2026]
- Xbox Prices Jump 50% in Europe, 33% in the US [2026]
- Xbox Layoffs: 3,200 Jobs Cut, 4 Studios Divested [2026]
- Xbox Shipments Sink 22%, Head Toward Zero by 2027 [2026]
- Xbox Cloud Gaming Goes Free: $0, 1-Hour Sessions [2026]
For more coverage of platform pricing, subscriber trends, and the business side of consoles and storefronts, visit our gaming section.
